Walks and the spectral radius of graphs

We give upper and lower bounds on the spectral radius of a graph in terms of the number of walks. We generalize a number of known results.Comment: Corrections were made in Theorems 5 and 11 (the new numbers are different), following a remark of professor Yaoping Ho

Spectral radius of finite and infinite planar graphs and of graphs of bounded genus

It is well known that the spectral radius of a tree whose maximum degree is $D$ cannot exceed $2\sqrt{D-1}$. In this paper we derive similar bounds for arbitrary planar graphs and for graphs of bounded genus. It is proved that a the spectral radius $\rho(G)$ of a planar graph $G$ of maximum vertex degree $D\ge 4$ satisfies $\sqrt{D}\le \rho(G)\le \sqrt{8D-16}+7.75$. This result is best possible up to the additive constant--we construct an (infinite) planar graph of maximum degree $D$, whose spectral radius is $\sqrt{8D-16}$. This generalizes and improves several previous results and solves an open problem proposed by Tom Hayes. Similar bounds are derived for graphs of bounded genus. For every $k$, these bounds can be improved by excluding $K_{2,k}$ as a subgraph. In particular, the upper bound is strengthened for 5-connected graphs. All our results hold for finite as well as for infinite graphs. At the end we enhance the graph decomposition method introduced in the first part of the paper and apply it to tessellations of the hyperbolic plane. We derive bounds on the spectral radius that are close to the true value, and even in the simplest case of regular tessellations of type $\{p,q\}$ we derive an essential improvement over known results, obtaining exact estimates in the first order term and non-trivial estimates for the second order asymptotics

Unsolved Problems in Spectral Graph Theory

Spectral graph theory is a captivating area of graph theory that employs the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices associated with graphs to study them. In this paper, we present a collection of $20$ topics in spectral graph theory, covering a range of open problems and conjectures. Our focus is primarily on the adjacency matrix of graphs, and for each topic, we provide a brief historical overview.Comment: v3, 30 pages, 1 figure, include comments from Clive Elphick, Xiaofeng Gu, William Linz, and Dragan Stevanovi\'c, respectively. Thanks! This paper will be published in Operations Research Transaction

Connections Between Extremal Combinatorics, Probabilistic Methods, Ricci Curvature of Graphs, and Linear Algebra

This thesis studies some problems in extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, Ricci curvature of graphs, spectral hypergraph theory and the interplay between these areas. The first main focus of this thesis is to investigate several Ramsey-type problems on graphs, hypergraphs and sequences using probabilistic, combinatorial, algorithmic and spectral techniques: The size-Ramsey number Rˆ(G, r) is defined as the minimum number of edges in a hypergraph H such that every r-edge-coloring of H contains a monochromatic copy of G in H. We improved a result of Dudek, La Fleur, Mubayi and Rödl [ J. Graph Theory 2017 ] on the size-Ramsey number of tight paths and extended it to more colors. An edge-colored graph G is called rainbow if every edge of G receives a different color. The anti-Ramsey number of t edge-disjoint rainbow spanning trees, denoted by r(n, t), is defined as the maximum number of colors in an edge-coloring of Kn containing no t edge-disjoint rainbow spanning trees. Confirming a conjecture of Jahanbekam and West [J. Graph Theory 2016], we determine the anti-Ramsey number of t edge-disjoint rainbow spanning trees for all values of n and t. We study the extremal problems on Berge hypergraphs. Given a graph G = (V, E), a hypergraph H is called a Berge-G, denoted by BG, if there exists an injection i ∶ V (G) → V (H) and a bijection f ∶ E(G) → E(H) such that for every e = uv ∈ E(G), (i(u), i(v)) ⊆ f(e). We investigate the hypergraph Ramsey number of Berge cliques, the cover-Ramsey number of Berge hypergraphs, the cover-Turán desity of Berge hypergraphs as well as Hamiltonian Berge cycles in 3-uniform hypergraphs. The second part of the thesis uses the ‘geometry’ of graphs to derive concentration inequalities in probabilities spaces. We prove an Azuma-Hoeffding-type inequality in several classical models of random configurations, including the Erdős-Rényi random graph models G(n, p) and G(n,M), the random d-out(in)-regular directed graphs, and the space of random permutations. The main idea is using Ollivier’s work on the Ricci curvature of Markov chairs on metric spaces. We give a cleaner form of such concentration inequality in graphs. Namely, we show that for any Lipschitz function f on any graph (equipped with an ergodic random walk and thus an invariant distribution ν) with Ricci curvature at least κ \u3e 0, we have ν (∣f − Eνf∣ ≥ t) ≤ 2 exp (-t 2κ/7). The third part of this thesis studies a problem in spectral hypergraph theory, which is the interplay between graph theory and linear algebra. In particular, we study the maximum spectral radius of outerplanar 3-uniform hypergraphs. Given a hypergraph H, the shadow of H is a graph G with V (G) = V (H) and E(G) = {uv ∶ uv ∈ h for some h ∈ E(H)}. A 3-uniform hypergraph H is called outerplanar if its shadow is outerplanar and all faces except the outer face are triangles, and the edge set of H is the set of triangle faces of its shadow. We show that the outerplanar 3-uniform hypergraph on n vertices of maximum spectral radius is the unique hypergraph with shadow K1 + Pn−1